Yeah what darthcarth said. It would also be cool if at certain planets you also got side missions for those civilians e.g. Empire has to destroy them and Rebels have to save them and you can get a bonus, but that they don't actually fight for either side and only retaliate or run away when attacked.

Yeah I knew he meant they would be NPCs but they still wont be very good in action. Definately a use for them in objective driven scenarios. The Empire could even need to save civilians from pirates/consortium too, after all they are supposed to be the order in the galaxy. There's plenty of variations. It would be good just to have them in as human/alien shields but you would prolly have to have a large number of ships on screen to pull this off and then you have to start thinking about performance. No doubt there would follow some crazy mods with passenger liners with more firepower than ISDs :P